Title of project:
Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind: Investigating Disorders of Self
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Dr Ulrika Maude, University of Bristol
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
Dr Elizabeth Barry, University of Warwick
Dr Laura Salisbury, University of Exeter
Funding sources:
The AHRC
Summary of research:
‘Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind’ is an interdisciplinary network that uses the radical insights of aesthetic modernism to develop dialogue with medical practice in psychiatry, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, neurology, and old age psychiatry. The project is dynamically interdisciplinary, fostering collaboration between researchers and clinicians working in Higher Education, the NHS, and international healthcare. It brings literary and arts scholars, philosophers, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, neuropsychologists, neurologists, and doctors in palliative care into dialogue with theatre practitioners, dancers and artists from across the UK, Europe and the USA, asking them to explore together the resources modernism offers for creatively understanding experiences of body and mind poorly served by realist models of the self.
The project explores the historical and discursive links between literary modernism, medical discoveries, and clinical practice. Underpinning the project is the significance of phenomenology and the first-person experience of medicine. The project considers modernism’s specific ability to speak to seemingly unruly mental and embodied states, and the conceptual ‘black hole’ of extreme old age, using performance-as-research strategies to consider how theatre and dance might help scholars and clinicians understand these states via experiential means. It also explores the role of the visual arts in communicating experiences that resist conceptual definition.
Project website/webpage:
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/projects/modernism-medicine-and-the-embodied-mind-investigating-disorders-of-the-self/
Anticipated time frame of project:
March 2015 to July 2016
Anticipated audiences:
Humanities and arts scholars and students, clinicians, healthcare practitioners, medical students
Tagged as:
Modernism, medicine, psychiatry, ageing, neurology
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Title of project:
Artatomy
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Rachael Allen, visual artist and researcher
Dr Iain Keenan, Newcastle University
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
N/A
Funding sources:
Newcastle Institute of Creative Arts Practice Award 2014
Summary of research:
Funded by Newcastle Institute of Creative Arts Practice Award 2014 as part of the transdisciplinary project ‘Student partner approaches for strategic design and evaluation of artistic modelling as a teaching and learning method in anatomy education’, Artatomy hosted two exhibitions at the University’s Students Union and International Centre for Life in collaboration with Dr Iain Keenan, Rachael Allen (visual artist and researcher) and undergraduate medical students. Artatomy brings the art of anatomy as explored by Newcastle undergraduate medical and biomedical students and focuses on learning and reflection through creativity, expression and imagination, where the students were invited to engage with the broader aesthetics, ethics and sensorial experience of anatomy.
“Giving them the chance to explore their creative side on their own terms, Artatomy has helped them re-connect with the process of drawing that they may not be using much in their studies or in their day to day life – and in some cases haven’t used since they were at school. The artwork they’ve produced is rich in imagination, skill and expression, and is indicative of the true potential and value of art when students are given the choice to explore and participate.” (Rachael Allen)
Project website/webpage:
http://www.life.org.uk/whats-on/artatomy#.VazlE_nbhjs
https://twitter.com/artatomy
Anticipated time frame of project:
2014-2015
Anticipated audiences:
Medical educators, medical students, artists
Tagged as:
Anatomy, medical education, visual arts
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Title of project:
Lessons in Anatomy: Dissecting medicine and health through visual and literary arts
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Rachael Allen, visual artist and researcher
Dr Eleanor Holmes, GP, clinical educator and writer – pen name Eliot North
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
N/A
Funding sources:
a-n New Collaboration Bursary
Summary of research:
Rachael Allen joined forces with Dr Eleanor Holmes to investigate the creative potential for collaborative engagement across the visual and literary arts through the exchange of experiences as artist and writer, whilst exploring the interface between medicine, health, the arts and humanities. The bursary subsidised valuable time exploring each other’s creative disciplines and methodologies – drawing, sculpture, creative writing and teaching – and specific research interests – anatomy, pathophysiology, medical education, clinical practice and bioethics – to inspire new ideas for joint visual and literary outcomes.
“We met as strangers from very different worlds (medicine and art) with contrasting backgrounds and experiences (doctor and patient) but found common languages with which to negotiate our beliefs and perspectives on human health, morbidity and mortality. The collaboration created an intimate space for us to share our own narratives, life stories and emotions that surfaced through our interactions. We are now friends. Our unfolding conversations drive our ongoing ‘Lessons in Anatomy’, illuminating not only the relationship between the arts and medicine but also the fine line separating the dead and the living, doctor and patient, health and illness, as well as the relationship between two women with very different views and experiences of mortality.”
Project website/webpage:
http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/4000721
Anticipated time frame of project:
November 2013 – July 2014
Anticipated audiences:
Medical Humanities scholars, visual artists, writers, General Practitioners
Would be interested in hearing from…
All interest in the project welcome – comments, contributions, research suggestions, funding opportunities.
Tagged as:
Creative arts, collaboration, anatomy, pathology, medical education
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Title of project:
Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture c. 1660-1832
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Professor Clark Lawlor, Northumbria University
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
Dr Jonathan Andrews, Newcastle University
Professor Allan Ingram, Northumbria University
Dr Leigh Wetherall Dickson, Northumbria University
Dr James Kennaway, Newcastle University
Dr Anita O’Connell, Northumbria University
Funding sources:
The Leverhulme Trust
Summary of research:
In the eighteenth century, as well as our own, certain diseases could be construed as endowing a sick person with some social or cultural cachet popularly associated with the illness. Melancholy could lend an air of creativity, gout could indicate class and wealth, and nerves could suggest a fashionable sensibility. A slight illness and enough wealth to travel could lead one to the spas and seaside resorts that, outside of London, formed the centres of fashionable society, or perhaps even lead abroad for warmer climes. As such, fashionable diseases also became the object of stigma, satire and allegations of fakery. They could be linked to the putative artificiality of ‘manners,’ modishness and the posturing of the beau monde. As Alexander Pope’s poetic satire says of women in the ‘Cave of Spleen,’ ‘The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a new disease.’ Yet while social discourses might define it as such, the afflicted might not find the experience of such diseases fashionable at all, but rather a reality of painful suffering.
The ‘Fashionable Diseases’ project interrogates the meanings of the word ‘fashionable’ when applied to disease, and particularly explores the ways in which the medicine, literature and culture of the eighteenth century define and represent often debilitating diseases as fashionable. It seeks to discover how labels alter our conceptions of disease and provide narratives that may be at variance with actual patient experience, or that might even construct that experience. We are especially interested in the role of literary writing in this ‘construction’ of a template for the experience of disease by sufferers. Our research aims to explore the differing discourses and representations of illnesses in the long eighteenth century to deliver a better understanding of the fashionability of disease in our own time.
Project website/webpage:
http://fashionablediseases.info
Anticipated time frame of project:
May 2013 – May 2016
Anticipated audiences:
Academic: literature, history, art, music, psychology, medical history, medicine; Non-academic: those interested in history of ideas and eighteenth-century history
Would be interested in hearing from…
Anyone wishing to collaborate, participate in workshops, come along to our events or anyone with similar interests. Please do get in touch.
Tagged as:
fashion, disease, eighteenth century, sensibility, sociability
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Title of project:
Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Dr. Gavin Miller, University of Glasgow
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
n/a
Funding sources:
The Wellcome Trust (Seed Award)
Summary of research:
The project investigates the significance of science fiction for the medical humanities, and is intended to pathfind for a future, large-scale research project.
Science fiction isn’t confined to novels, short stories, and cinema; it also gives us a style and substance for our visions of medical progress. This project doesn’t investigate only the familiar genre elements of narrative fiction, cinema and TV. It also explores the so-called ‘technoscientific imaginary’, and its imagining of future possibilities enabled by biomedical progress.
The project’s activities include:
A series of themed workshops, and a concluding conference, consolidating a network of interested researchers, clinicians, and writers.
An online database of primary and secondary resources to aid future research.
A themed special issue of BMJ Medical Humanities on ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’
A creative writing competition, with successful entrants appearing in a competition anthology.
Project website/webpage:
http://scifimedhums.glasgow.ac.uk
Anticipated time frame of project:
September 2015 to August 2016
Anticipated audiences:
Those involved in the medical humanities, literary studies, bioethics, science studies and film studies.
Would be interested in hearing from…
Academics, clinicians, creative writers
Tagged as:
science fiction, technoscience
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Title of project:
Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries
Name and institution of principle investigators:
Professor Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
Professor Chris Lintott, University of Oxford
Professor Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester
Julie Harvey, Natural History Museum
Paul Cooper, Natural History Museum
Dr John Tweddle, Natural History Museum
Dr Sam Alberti, Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons
Thalia Knight, Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons
Keith Moore, the Royal Society
Names and institutions of postdoctoral research assistants:
Dr Sally Frampton, University of Oxford
Dr Geoffrey Belknap, University of Leicester
Dr Berris Charnley, University of Oxford
Dr Jim O’Donnell, University of Oxford
Names and institutions of PhD students:
Alison Moulds, University of Oxford
Matthew Wale, University of Leicester
Funding sources:
The AHRC
Summary of research:
This project brings together historical and literary research in the nineteenth century with twenty-first century scientific practice, looking at the ways in which patterns of popular communication and engagement in nineteenth-century science can offer models for current practice. It is based at the Universities of Oxford and Leicester, in partnership with the Natural History Museum, the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society. Researchers are drawing on these institutions’ historical collections, particularly science and medical journals of the nineteenth century. They also work with their scientific communities, addressing questions about the creation and circulation of knowledge in the digital age, and looking at innovative ways of breaking through the public/professional divide.
Project website/webpage:
http://conscicom.org/
Anticipated time frame of project:
3 years (December 2013- December 2017)
Anticipated audiences:
Historians of Science and Medicine, Cultural and Literary Historians of the Nineteenth Century, Scientific and Medical Professionals, Citizen Scientists and Patients
Tagged as:
Medical Humanities, History of Science, History of Medicine, Journals, Interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinary Research
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